Director: Tao Qin (Ching Doe)
This film has all the essential ingredients of weepie melodrama – young virginal love, sacrifice, love reborn and finally a slow tragic death – but the film never overplays its hand as it treats all this with near gentility – heroic biting your lip type of thing that makes it all the more effective. Sure there are tears a plenty but the characters are always fighting them back and trying to hide their heartbreak. It is an adult film with adult themes (particularly for the time) and the intended audience at the time was probably adults and that makes all the difference I think in the film’s approach to its subject. The story is really a very simple one.

After her mother dies the innocent country girl Li Qingqing comes to Hong Kong to live with her uncle who is a pianist in a nightclub band. While waiting for him she runs into an inebriated Pengang who is the somewhat wastrel son of a wealthy businessman. After finding out that she can sing, he forces her to do so in front of a crowd of friends – perhaps to amuse them – but instead she knocks them dead with her rendition of “Mountain Song”. Feeling embarrassed the next day, Pengang uses his influence to get her a job singing in a nightclub and her performances become more polished and she becomes a quick success. They begin to go out, they fall in love but this is of course just the build up to the inevitable weepie material.